Perfect time of year for this photo (I mean when it was taken) - there is an almost organic connection as the old hunk fades back into minerals and soil ... the poem takes up this thread and weaves it carefully all together.

The vehicle at issue here was a 54 Chevy pickup, powder blue, which I had bought (and the price also included a rusty box of tools) for $50, drove on mostly unpaved country roads for the better part of a year, occasionally ventured over hill and dale to civilization with (always perilous, at best, not to go into the details), and, when it died a natural/unnatural death, left parked immobile on the dirt road out front until somebody got up the gumption (a kindness, to me) to come along and drive it off, no questions asked.

A few years later, in the Front Range of the Rockies, we were stuck for a winter up near timberline, in a zone full of spooky abandoned mineshafts and abandoned vehicles littering the scrub pine wilderness. Guys in webhats with newer model pickup trucks (loaded rifle racks) drove up after Broncos games to drink Coors and shoot up the older abandoned pickup trucks.

I'm not sure whether in pickup truck depth psychology that would be patricide, matricide, or fratricide.

I wonder if the tree will grow into it (or, in a sense vice versa). There's an old fence in my town that an even older tree has grown through so that part of the fence is now embedded into the tree trunk in a way that seems impossibly original and any sculptor would envy. I've seen tricycles and other objects imbedded in tree trunks that grew through or around them as well. It's nice to see Mother Nature triumph still despite our overruning her with our detritus.